


Two Tramps in Mud Time

by Amazingspaceship



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Alternate Universe, F/M, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Pining, Time Loop, but dont worry they get better, the major character death is there because there is A LOT
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-20
Updated: 2018-04-20
Packaged: 2019-04-25 07:02:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14373444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amazingspaceship/pseuds/Amazingspaceship
Summary: The concept of a time loop practically necessitates death.Aradia finds this out. Over and over again.





	Two Tramps in Mud Time

**Author's Note:**

> _The sun was warm but the wind was chill._   
>  _You know how it is with an April day_   
>  _When the sun is out and the wind is still,_   
>  _You're one month on in the middle of May._   
>  _But if you so much as dare to speak,_   
>  _A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,_   
>  _A wind comes off a frozen peak,_   
>  _And you're two months back in the middle of March._

Aradia dies for the sixty-sixth time in late hours of the morning, before the moon has fully risen.

Her elegy is short and succinct; she has no quadrants to speak of, no hatefriends to be present for her final breath. There are no spectators aside from the parasites curling in the rotted wood of the gallows, the seabirds swooping low on the horizon. The only trolls attending her execution are the legislator who caught her, the hangtroll who will kill her, and Aradia herself.

It's very nearly peaceful.

The sky above is just as much lowblood yellow as it is highblood purple. They are by the coast, and the faint call of seagulls is muffled by the roaring of the waves. She can see a row of hives lining a distant hill, burnt and bombed by the revolution’s war. Shells, all of them. Burnt out husks.

"Aradia Megido," the legislacerator says, "you have been found guilty of murder, attempted murder, robbery, rebellion, revolution, sedition, assault, attempted assault, desertion, treason, and more. For these crimes your punishment is death. Have you any final words?"

Aradia spits blood. She is covered with mottled bruises, splotches of rust along her arms, legs, chest. She can't see out of her left ganderbulb. Her right leg is most certainly broken. Two sweeps ago she'd gotten in a fistfight with a highblood, and her nose had been broken six different ways. It hurt badly then--this is worse. It is not a sharp pain, but a intense, all around ache. It is as if her very atoms are rending themselves apart underneath her skin.

"Go to hell," she growls.

The legislacerator nods, solemn. "So it shall be. May the messiahs guide your soul."

The executioner pulls the lever, and Aradia swings--

*

\--and lands, gasping, in a room of sterile white. "Fuck!

She's in a small block, fifteen feet square. It is completely empty--no fixtures, no apparent light sources, nothing--save for the alien in the corner.

Dave winces sympathetically. "Hanging, huh?" He’s leaning against a wall, weird and decidedly un-troll (though also strangely trollish) in a red-stained brown coat and torn blue jeans.

"Yep," Aradia says. She massages her throat. "You?"

He opens his jacket to reveal a collection of scarlet bullet holes. "Bank robbery," Dave says. "I was on my way to work and wandered right into it like a dumbass. Completely stupid."

"Shit," Aradia sucks in a breath. "You been here long?"

"Couple hours." Dave checks his watch. "Other two will probably be here in a minute."

Aradia nods, and settles in to wait.

*

The concept of a time loop practically necessitates death.

*

The time between lives is always strangely peaceful. It's usually just the two of them, her and Dave, waiting in companionable silence for the other shoe to drop. Sometimes they talk, sometimes they don't--either way, it's nice to see a friendly face after the painful affair that is dying.

There's a flash of red, the smell of sulfur, and then Caliborn appears, cursing and spitting, his face a mask of fury. His tiny green hands are balled into fits, claws biting into the palms. "Fucking--shit--god damn sons of bitches you--hell--stick it up your--" He claws at the walls, screeching, banging his peg leg petulantly. _Temper tantrum,_ Aradia thinks.

"Chill out, Skeletor," Dave says. "Pump the brakes, there."

Caliborn rounds on Dave, his eye sockets narrowing. He growls. "Oh. You shitheads."

Aradia pats the floor beside her. "What was it this time?"

"Drowning," Caliborn sulks, crossing his arms and sliding down the wall. "Not even a decent death. Just drowning."

"Too bad I missed it," says Dave, "I would have paid good money to see that."

Caliborn launches himself at Dave, snarling, but before he can make contact there is a tremendous bang. A flash of red, the smell of sulfur descending, and then Damara appears. Her head is in her hands. Literally.

"Whoa," Dave says. "Beheading?"

"Fuck your grub-sack shit-nubs fucker."

"Harsh."

"Oh," Aradia says, standing, "it's time."

The room they're in has begun to fade. The white walls, floor, the splashes of color that are her compatriots--they are disappearing into grey nothingness. Aradia watches as Dave stands, stretches, and readjusts his shades. "Right," he says, "loop number 67. Let's do this."

*

Aradia wakes up in the same place she always does--in her too small recuperacoon back on Alternia, suddenly six sweeps old again, her husktop chiming in the corner of her room.

She rolls over in the slime, groaning, ignoring the high-pitched pings of Trollian. She knows who it is, and as much as she would like to have the same conversation with Nepeta for the umpteenth time she isn't quite feeling up to it. That last death hit her a little harder than usual.

The rules of the loop, or at least as many of them as she and Dave can determine (Caliborn and Damara won't help) are thus:

1.) They always start in the same place.  
2.) Dying can happen whenever but they always return to the white room within sixteen hours of one another.  
3.) Nothing is carried over between loops except for memories.

What they don't know: why them, how it happens, or how to stop it.

Aradia gets in the habit of measuring loops in terms of progress, like a percent marker in a video game. Sometimes she makes it to the end of her lifespan, and sometimes she doesn't. Mostly she tries to see how much shit she can get away with before she either is culled or has an unfortunate and terminal accident. It drives away the boredom, somewhat.

*

Loop 67 ends with a fire, six pedigrees before conscription. Aradia lands in the white room with rust-red burns all over her skin, the smell of burning wood still clinging to her clothes.

Caliborn is there already, ineffectually tugging at a sword stuck, hilt-deep, in his stomach. Dave isn't there. The two of them have managed to figure out that they each appear in the order that they die--which means Dave made it farther than her, this time. Aradia lies down on the floor to wait.

She doesn’t have to wait long. Dave appears with the usual flash, within an hour or two of her arrival, and he’s grinning. “AJ?” he says, and proffers her a bottle.

*

They amend their list of rules to include--if you die with it, you can keep it.

*

It is tedious, being six sweeps old again. Aradia wakes during loop 86 feeling like her skin is too small, like she’s been shrunken down,. Like she doesn't fit into her own body. When she can stand to talk to her hatefriends it makes her crazy, their petty squabbles beneath her now that she’s died nearly a hundred ways. When Nepeta messages her about quadrant troubles and recalcitrant moirails Aradia wants to scream.

She reads, learns to juggle, snaps pictures of the Alternian landscape as a gift for Dave. She has taken to wearing a small leather pouch around her neck at all times, filled with things she wants to take between the loops, in preparation for a sudden death. Conscription happens and she does the same thing she always does--talks to the right people at the same time, aces her written test but fails the physical and psionic exams. She knows exactly what she needs to do to avoid helming, and is rerouted to the Ruffianialator Corps.

Service to the Empire is a violent and painful affair. The Ruffianialators move from planet to planet, indiscriminately wiping out it's native inhabitants. The aliens don't usually put up a fight, and when they do it is typically underwhelming. Rare is the race which is able to slow down their demise. Aradia thinks of the Empire as like a giant, metal wheel--not especially elegant, but capable of crushing everything underneath it given ample time.

She is shot to death on a distant planet, and afterwards she curls next to Dave to show him pictures of her homeworld.

*

It isn’t until their centuplicate loop that they decide to visit one another.

It is Dave’s idea. Aradia had managed in loop 99 to procure a cake, and they eat it in ‘totes ironic celebration’ of loop 100. The cake was, appropriately, red and brown.

“We should do something to celebrate,” Dave says. “Something other than this shitty cake.”

“Hey,” she laughs, “fuck you! I worked real hard on it”

“I hate to tell you this, ‘Radia,” Dave says around a mouth of chocolate, “but you can’t bake for shit.”

They hash it out then, over the sounds of Caliborn messily devouring his slice. Aradia promises to steal a ship, and chart a course for Earth. Dave promises to wait, and not die.

“I’ll see you later,” Dave says, and Aradia’s stomach does a giddy flip, at that.

*

When she touches down on Earth in a stolen ship, Dave is waiting for her.

The first thing he says to her is “Jesus Christ, you look tired.”

The first thing she says to him is “so do you.”

They drive to a nearby motel and he sneaks her in through the back, a towel around her head to hide the horns. They play cards and drink human soporifics, watch Earth soap operas and make fun of the actors, get drunk and dance a merry jig on the greasy bed. She wakes the next evening with Dave's head on her chest, one arm draped over her left horn. She threads a hand through his hair and feels the rise and fall of his chest.

It turns out he snores. Like a cholerbear.

Dave shows her the sights of Earth, or at least all the sights they can get to (given that their resources consist of a beat-up old pickup and 40 human dollars). They see tourist trap after tourist trap, drive through the human desert and play loud music on the radio. Dave teaches her the lyrics to popular human songs, and laughs at her when she can’t pronounce things. They hike through the Grand Canyon and slip off the rocky edge. When they appear in the white room Dave's hand is still entwined with hers.

*

(They do it again, and again, and again, and eventually Aradia gets used to, every ten or fifteen sweeps or so, touching down on Earth to see Dave waiting for her.)

*

It is the one hundred and fourth loop, and the revolution is proceeding pleasantly.

They call her Witch, Oracle, Precog. They say that she can predict a battle before it happens, stop bullets in the air before they strike down a comrade, breach the threshold between life and death and pull a dying troll from the Handmaid's grasp. They say that she can blow starships out of the sky, raise armies of the dead to siege fortresses, breathe in the blackness of space and tear the souls out of sleeping trolls.

Aradia finds all of this extremely funny.

She leads squads and armies to victory because she knows exactly where to be when. She knows what word in the right ear will get them troops, money, weapons. She knows what parts of the rebellion ships will break and when, and when they do she knows how to fix them. When Feferi contracts horn rot she knows where to get medicine cheaply and discreetly, because it has happened dozens of times before.

She crouches in dimly-lit buildings and studies maps, troop movements, strategies, and memorizes everything. Everything that they do, and everything that the Condesce does. She takes care to keep the loops as identical as possible--if she deviates too much it will mess with her plans, and sometimes even the slightest of changes can dramatically alter the river of time. Some random deviation is inevitable, of course, but you can only be so meticulous, so careful.

This is how you win a war. Trial and error. Fortunately for Aradia, she gets a lot of trials.

Today Karkat is giving a speech on a colony planet, a solar system or two away from the homeworld, and Aradia is acting as bodyguard. She’s done this eighty-three times before, and so she knows exactly what to do when. She talks to the right people beforehand, singles the assassins out of a thousand-troll crowd, knows exactly where to place people on the rooftops around the stadium.

When a chunk of the ceiling above Karkat crumbles--something that hasn’t happened in any of the other loops, it must be one of those random deviations--Aradia pushes him out of the way and it crushes her instead.

*

Aradia has read about cherubs, and she knows that they aren't supposed to be short and stumpy forever. The fact that Caliborn has never progressed beyond the "small angry asshole" stage of his development seems indicative of his personality. He has, she thinks, the emotional maturity of a pupa, or maybe a particularly rabid barkbeast.

But when he shows up between loops 112 and 113 as nothing more than a red, gooey pulp, she is still faintly upset.

"What that?" Damara hisses. "Gross."

"Fuck, Dude," Dave says. "You get into a fight with a wood chipper or something? Fuck."

The other two skirt around him, but Aradia pokes at the gory mass. "When we come here, we're basically invincible, right?” she muses. “But we still retain our death injuries." The pulp jiggles a little bit. "Do you think he's still sentient in there?"

"He might be an asshole," Dave says, "but for his sake, I hope not."

Aradia brings Caliborn a gift the next time--a pound of raw meat. Caliborn devours it messily, and she pretends that she can't see him throwing her thankful looks from across the room. He has the shivery look of a trauma patient, the kind of stare unique to the dying and the dead. They’ve all died in particularly gruesome ways, over the past hundred cycles, but none of them as badly as he has. This earns him sympathy, though Aradia promises to herself, privately, that this will be the last time.

*

It happens during loop 121.

Aradia comes down in a wheat field somewhere in the midwestern portion of Dave's planet, and when she emerges from the ship's smoky interior Dave is waiting. He makes the usual sarcastic comments about her “60's-ass looking space alien jumpsuit” and she kicks at his shins while he laughs. They drive to Dave's apartment, which despite being new and swanky and won by gaming the lottery system is still furnished like a two-bedroom flat. During the days they go out (Aradia tells everyone who asks that she's cosplaying for a local convention, and Dave tells everyone that she's deathly ill) and sample the best Earth has to offer, which appears mostly to be tiny antiques shops and Walmarts. In the evenings and nights they watch movies and play boardgames and stay up all night drinking.

One night Dave tries to make them dinner. He bustles around in the kitchen yelling things about serving sizes and proper cookware, and spends a half hour trying to locate the spaghetti sticks. Aradia, watching from the adjoining room, finds herself studying him. The way he cuts smoothly through slices of meat without seeming to think, and yet can't figure out what a teaspoon is; the way he hums when he's thinking lazily, the way he goes silent and focused when he's thinking hard; the single-mindedness with which he cooks. When he stubs his toe on the side of a counter he hops around swearing, and Aradia realizes with a dawning horror that she wants to go over and _pap_ him.

Dinner turns out okay, if a little bit burnt, and when Aradia finds her gaze lingering on the curves of Dave's face (soft, papable) she goes red as a beet and busies herself with her food.

After this she begins to notice things. When Dave wakes early in the morning and pads downstairs in his t-shirt and boxers her bloodpusher stutters. When he asks her endless questions about trolls (“tell me about quadrants again, I still don't get those”) she finds herself acting more patient than she would believe herself to be. When Dave punches her playfully on the arm her skin tingles where his fist makes contact, and lasts for several minutes afterwards.

The thing is: humans are very pitiable. They have no horns, claws, or fangs. No lusii, no trials. There's barely any fight in them so speak of. As species go they are like meowbeast kittens, or a particularly defenseless type of newborn grub.

But these are excuses, justifications. Aradia finds Dave pitiable for different reasons.

When he tells her about his brother she sees diamonds. When he curls up next to her to watch cartoons she sees diamonds. When he comes back from work angry, grumbling about difficult producers and idiot actors, she feels so pale for him that she wants to drag him kicking and screaming to a pile. She wants to pap him silly and draw a smile out of his unhappy face. She wants to... She...

She wants...

She doesn't know what she wants. For Dave to stop being stupid? For humans to adopt a sane system of romance? Any troll would have picked up on her interest by now--while she's not exactly making overtures she's also not being subtle--but instead Dave just sits there, getting more and more pitiful by the minute, and all the while Aradia curses human society for being the ultimate pile-block.

*

A fight was inevitable, really.

Damara is incandescent with fury. Green static whips off her body, searing scorch marks into the room’s walls. Dave, for his part, is holding his ground, in a determined sort of way that she would find pitiable in any other situation. Caliborn is cowering in a corner--for all his bluster and bite he seems disinclined to get between the two.

“Calm down,” Aradia says. She puts a hand on Dave’s shoulder, which he shrugs off. “Let’s talk about this, maybe?”

“Fuck no,” Dave says. He grits his teeth, balls his hands into fists. Aradia’s seen him angry, seen him mad, but she’s never seen him really _pissed_. He looks like he’s about to punch a hole in the wall, indestructibility be damned. “She insulted me.”

“He insult me first!”

“There’s no point to this,” Aradia soothes, trying to ignore the fact that she's technically auspicizing. “This is stupid--if you two could just…”

Damara goes down under the force of Dave’s fists, and the resulting psionic explosion starts loop 114 slightly early for all four of them.

*

Dave bakes them all an apology cake, and when he offers Damara a hand she wordlessly shakes it. There’s only four of them, and so there’s no point in squabbling. They’re all they’ve got.

*

There is so much of space.

Aradia has gotten good, really really good, at avoiding being helmed. On loop 126, though, she slips up. Accidents happen, of course, but the result is that she spends thirty sweeps buried in a tangle of biowire, her skin punctured by burrowing cable, her organs augmented with troll biotech. The Alternian Empire takes great care that their slaves should remain functional, and so her exoskeleton is reinforced by steel. When her lungs develop holes they are patched with synthetic pleura, and when her heart gives out seventeen sweeps into her service it is replaced by an electronic pump. When pirates breach the helmsblock and sever her left arm from her torso, it is sewn back on. She screams and screams and screams, but they will not let her die.

Thirty sweeps in she contracts a virus. Not the physical kind, but the digital, the kind of trojan worm that burrows through the Empire’s servers like black fish swimming through a sea of tar. In her insanity she pilots a battleship into the heart of a sun, and when she appears in the white room she is a pile of imbrued ash.

After another seven gruesome loops--flaying, dismemberment, cannibalism, incineration again, brain-death twice, and finally a painful and prolonged electrocution--she begins to develop a theory.

*

“Our deaths,” she says to Dave, “are becoming more and more macabre.”

They’re standing at the bow of a cruise ship, on her latest visit to Earth. She’s wearing what feels like thirty tons of facepaint, baggy clothes, and a sun hat over her horns. Dave had pronounced her the “height of fashion,” and for that remark she had chased him around the boat like a pupa, laughing. Now they’re lounging in adjacent deck chairs. A violin plays from somewhere far off.

Dave thinks on this. Last loop he had shown up crushed to death, which was horrible for Aradia and probably worse for him. “Makes sense,” he says, “but that would mean there's some kind of intent in the loops. Like there’s something causing this to happen.”

“Exactly,” Aradia says.

Dave remains skeptical until the ship sinks, and they freeze to death in the icy water. Afterwards, in the time between, he comes to her--shivering, his skin clammy and cold--and nods shakily.

Something isn’t right.

*

Dave shows her _Groundhog Day_ one lazy human summer.

They're snuggled together on Dave's old couch, a tattered old afghan thrown over them. Dave is petting her hair, giving her scritches around the horns. It's not really a pile, but it's still sufficiently pale enough that Aradia is beginning to feel drowsy. She's blearily wondering about whether or not Dave would let her rub his back when something in the movie makes her sit up.

“Oh, right,” Dave says. “This is the part where whatshisface, Bill Murray, learns that the real treasure was love all along or whatever. I honestly don't really remember this movie, I just thought it'd be funny to watch considering--”

He prattles on and on while she stares at the screen.

Aradia is struck by a realization.

There must be a solution. Every maze has an end, and no puzzle is unsolvable. There has to be a _reason_ for the looping. There must be something they can do to break the cycle, some win condition they have to meet.

Aradia expresses this to Dave, who again is skeptical. “I;m not saying you're wrong,” he says, “but I think we need a little more proof that this is all somehow, like, _intentional_ before we can make that kind of leap.”

It's the best she can hope for.

*

Dave brings a blinking chunk of machinery with him into the interim after the loop's conclusion. It is a green handheld device, somewhat slap-dash in nature, a buzzing, chaotic mess of readouts, radar dishes, and screens. He tells her that he has a friend, a scientist, who was nice enough to make this for him. Dave waves it around the white room, across the walls and the floor and the ceiling, and nods very seriously at the numbers that it spits out. Just before the next loop begins, he sits down beside Aradia.

“There’s nothing,” he says, and his voice is choked with defeat. “The thing Jade gave me was supposed to measure depth, how thick the walls are.” He gestures to the screen. “They go on forever, practically. Miles and miles. It’s like we’re underground, or something.”

“So what?” She asks. “What does that mean?”

“It means,” he says, “that there's no escape. There's nowhere to _go_. This is all there is.”

The atmosphere in the room is very somber, after that.

*

Suffocation. Drowning. Psionic overload. Impalement. Incineration. Flaying.

Aradia can feel it--the way every death rocks her essence, her very soul, to the core. When she appears in the white room now she has very little to say, and very little to do. Neither do any of the others. When she is alive she feels phantom pains running underneath her skin. When she looks in the mirror she expects to see a charred out shell, hollowed, a corpse with a hundred thousand scars.

Caliborn and Damara have stopped fighting, stopped squabbling, stopped talking entirely. All Dave and Aradia have the energy to do is talk in low voices, crouched on the textureless floor. They hold one another like moirails, and Aradia would laugh at the sheer hilarity of it if she didn't think it would turn into a sob somewhere in her throat.

They stop keeping track of the loops. There's no point. The deaths are not only getting more violent, they’re also happening quicker and quicker.

It's almost like things are unraveling--like everything is falling apart at the seams.

*

The latest loop is somewhere in the vicinity of 250. This is the earliest death by far: Aradia dies three nights after waking up.

When she tears her eyes open, gasping, choking on sopor, she is immediately confronted with the certainty that something is wrong. The sky outside her hive is a deep red-orange, and the air smells like ozone and gasoline. She stumbles out her door, coughing, to stare at what must be a million ships in the planet's atmosphere. _The Fleet_ , she thinks. A great organic machine. The wicked red of the Battleship Condescension like a bloodpusher at the center, barbed and fanged.

Aradia is filled with an unspeakable, visceral horror--and also an elation, a sick kind of thrill.

_This has never happened before._ And it is the fact of this which elates her.

She runs into her hive and boots up her husktop. For a moment she can't comprehend what she's reading, just picks out snatches of headlines like _DEATH OF MOTHERGRUB AT REBEL CLAWS CONFIRMED_ and _ALTERNIAN FLEET PLANS INVASION OF HOMEWORLD_ and _EMPRESS DECLARES PLANET “UNSALVAGEABUBBLE.”_

\-- apocalypseArisen [AA] started trolling carcinoGeneticist [CG] \--

AA: WHAT DID Y0U D0   
AA: WHAT DID Y0U D0 WHAT DID Y0U D0 WHAT DID Y0U D0   
CG: UH.   
CG: EXCUSE ME?   
AA: the ships   
AA: why are there FUCKING SHIPS KARKAT   
AA: WHY ARE THEY HERE   
CG: WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?   
CG: THE ONLY SHIPS I SEE ARE THE ONES IN FRONT OF ME.   
CG: YOU KNOW, THE ONES IN OUR HANGAR?   
CG: WHICH WE BOUGHT.   
CG: WITH MONEY.   
CG: LOOK, THERE'S YOURS.   
CG: I DON'T SEE YOU, THOUGH. DON'T YOU HAVE SOME SORT OF MISSION TO RUN SOON?   
AA: what is wr0ng with y0u   
AA: what   
AA: i d0nt   
AA: i d0nt understand   
CG: WHAT SHIPS ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT??   
AA: the ships that are ab0ut t0 attack alternia   
AA: WHY   
AA: ARE   
AA: THEY   
AA: HERE?   
CG: WHOA   
CG: YOU'RE ON ALTERNIA?

\-- apocalypseArisen [AA] blocked carcinoGeneticist [CG] \--

Aradia leans back in her chair. Okay. Okay. Focus.

They've somehow managed to start the revolution early. How? She doesn't know. What she _does_ know is that they're somewhere else. Apparently unaware that she's still here.

She has no idea what the fuck is going on.

She starts pacing. Something happened before she woke up. Something that altered the course of the timeline. She has no idea how that happened, or what would have caused it. Events have been changed, altered. The mother grub is dead, somehow, which means theres no way to process the slurry, which means...

She is stricken with a terrible, terrible realization: they're going to bomb the planet.

She's going to have to get off planet.

_Fast._

*

Genevu Hilaks is the sketchiest troll in the whole lowlands, but he's also the only troll who can get her a starship. She spends three days walking to his warehouse. She has blackmail material for exactly this sort of situation, but if that falls through she can just kill him. It won't really matter in a night or two.

But when she gets to his base--an old legislacerator compound, repurposed to store orbital jaunters and four-winged fighters--all she finds is a crumbling brick building and the words “REBEL” and “HERETIC” written in smeary yellow blood along the walls.

She pushes through a rusty door and steps into the warehouse. Instead of rows of junky, discount shuttles, she finds nothing but dust. And, at the center of the room, a small trash fire.

Scavengers? Bandits? She creeps closer, her hand on her whip. There's a single figure sitting on a fallen length of timber, their horns and face hidden by a voluminous black cloak. She gasps when they turn towards her suddenly, and she instinctively lashes out with her whip.

The figure sidesteps the strike easily, almost gracefully, at the same time raising a covered arm. Aradia sees a brief flash of psionic energy before she is lifted into the air, smashing through the roof of the warehouse and being flung into the smoky sky. She twists in midair, wrests control from the cloaked figure, and plummets, trailing sparks, towards the ground.

They fight. The cloaked figure--whoever it is--is fast. They seem to know exactly what she'll do before she does it. It's eerie. Aradia is so used to being the one in the know.

Whats weirder: there's something _familiar_ about the way they move. Some quality about them that she can't place.

Her whip tries to curl around the figure's leg but they sidestep and unbalance her with a wave of psionics. She picks herself up with her mind and launches headlong at the figure, only to glance off their psychic shielding. When she outstretches her arms for a concentrated energy blast her opponent matches her, exactly as strong, possibly even stronger.

They are locked like this for seconds, minutes, a blazing inferno of crackling energy at the center of the room.

She grits her teeth, digs her heels into the concrete floor. It's no use. They're too strong. She's loosing ground, and she knows it. “Who are you?” She yells desperately, and at that moment--she knows. Perhaps she's known the whole time, but in the moments before she is blown away she knows with a cold, detached certainty.

There is an explosion and she is lifted off her feet, thrown across the room like a sack of flour. When she hits the wall it is with a sickly wet _crunch_.

The last thing she sees is her own face, staring impassively at her from underneath a black hood.

And so she dies: in the late hours of the evening, six nights before the the fiery death of her homeworld.


End file.
